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  • Œuvres complètes, série I. Œuvres critiques, II: De la littérature et autres essais littéraires by Madame de Staël
  • Paul Rowe
Madame de Staël, Œuvres complètes, série I. Œuvres critiques, II: De la littérature et autres essais littéraires. (Âge des Lumières, 70.) Sous la direction de Stéphanie Genand. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 795 pp.

In the spirit of Germaine de Staël’s preference for dynamism over convention, Stéphanie Genand and her team have resisted the temptation to follow the composition of the volumes of Auguste de Staël’s edition of his mother’s works of 1821. The present publication, therefore, brings together texts that were dispersed in different volumes of that collection and adds some previously unpublished texts. Spelling is modernized throughout and the annotation is extensive and informative. The centrepiece of the volume is, of course, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales; the coherence of the volume emerges from the way that the shorter, often less well-known works reflect its central preoccupations. Jean Goldzink’s introduction to De la littérature addresses an omission noted by Axel Blaeschke in the introduction to his Classiques Garnier edition of 1998: while the connection between De la littérature and Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois was a critical commonplace, it had never been studied properly. Goldzink duly argues that De la littérature must be read as a philosophy of history rather than as a history of literature: it is grounded on Montesquieu’s opening observation that laws are necessary relationships (the rapports of Staël’s full title) derived from the nature of things and is inspired by his attempt to understand political institutions in relation to the conditions that produced them. Staël adds to Montesquieu the late Enlightenment’s conception of perfectibilité, and posits a reciprocal relationship between societies and literatures, in contrast to her contemporary Bonald’s one-way assertion that literature is the expression of society. These arguments combine to allow her to present literature as a driver of progress and to argue against prescriptive notions of literary value. Goldzink’s subtle analysis allows him to draw out the nuances of Staël’s thought and to emphasize that her works were not derivative, as some of her critics have suggested, but rather the result of a constructive engagement with a series of thinkers, both in person and through the written word. In fact, for Staël, change and exchange were vital components of perfectibilité, at the interpersonal as well as the intercultural level, and notions of intellectual merit predicated on the model of the isolated thinker have limited value when assessing her work. Christine Pouzoulet’s approach in her introduction to Staël’s entry on Camoëns for Michaud’s Biographie universelle indicates a more useful approach, drawing out the extent of collaboration between Staël and August Wilhelm Schlegel to show how she exercised her independent judgement in a genuinely collaborative exchange of views, leading to an original text. The contributors are to be congratulated on these and other introductions, casting new light on familiar texts and bringing new ones to critical attention.

Paul Rowe
University of Leeds
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